"Barbara Bush blamed Donald Trump for her heart attack," Susan Page writes at USA Today, excerpting her upcoming book on the former first lady, The Matriarch. "It wasn't technically a heart attack, though she called it that. It was a crisis in her long battle with congestive heart failure and chronic pulmonary disease that hit her like a sledgehammer one day in June 2016," when Trump had secured the Republican nomination after repeatedly humiliating her son, Jeb Bush.
By February 2018, when Page asked Bush if she still considered herself a Republican, she answered, "I'd probably say no today." Page called that "a stunning acknowledgment" from "one of the most recognizable faces of the Republican Party through two presidencies," two months before her death.
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